While many of us disagree with all items that are classified I doubt you will find any organization which we would all agree upon that could make good decisions. Any such organization not within government would have to thoroughly vetted to insure their integrity and that all documents until accepted as non classified are treated as classified
And, clearly, Bradley Manning believed that the public's definition of "appropriately" might differ significantly from the government's.
First of all, the US was pressuring Honduras to re-instate the president.
Next, there were complex constitutional issues. The US ambassador's opinion isn't more important than the Honduran supreme court.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Honduran_constitutional_cr...
Now, in a decent open democracy, there should be such people who do have the authority, clearance and moral independence, who we can all trust to do that for a whistle-blower. But, the problem is two fold, 1) who do we trust, and 2) the content of the documents proves that the US government could not be trusted.
So, he had to give the lot to some one he trusted would do morally the right thing, and release what was necessary. At that point in time, wikileaks was big and had a decent reputation. His case was, AFAIK, the first to go wrong, and the first to show that wikileaks was not robust and smart enough to do the job properly. Of course after the even, people slag wikileaks off and say he shouldn't have gone there. In hind sight, yes.
With Snowden, I guess that the Guardian and its lawyers are being very damn careful about what they release. I guess they have information that would be dangerous and they are probably rightly sitting on it. But here were possibly see a much better filtering and vetting process. No, not one governments like, but one that give us enough information to point fingers, but not enough to get people killed.
But, for a "simple" whistle-blower, they have no choice but to grab all they can, and trust people who know what they are doing to filter the material to a) prove a case or accusation, and b)protect the innocent and vulnerable. In that I include agents and what not legitimately intelligence gathering. Manning's mistake was a reasonable one. He was right at the time to think wikileaks was a reasonable route, but obviously that has since been tarnished.
Of course what we really need is this independent, trust-able, official route for whistle-blowers. But Im not sure how that can really happen satisfactorily. Hence the incredible value of decent journalists.
This is exactly what whistleblowing is about. You understand and have evidence that a specific crime is being committed, and you release info about that specific crime.
If you don't have a grasp of what is going on, then the proper response isn't "hey I'm not sure what I'm doing or looking at, so let me publish everything I can get my mits on because I think there is something fishy."
> U.S. tried to get Spain to curb its probes of Gitmo torture and rendition.
> U.S. knew all about massive corruption in Tunisia back in 2006 but went on supporting the government anyway, making it the pillar of its North Africa policy.
> U.S. pressured the European Union to accept GM — genetic modification, that is.
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